The healing trees and the river are to be
carried to the city.
CHAPTER XII
WESTERN TOWNS AND CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH PORTAGE PATHS
The old French portage paths were also fruitful of cities on the edge of
the Mississippi Valley, though the growth of these short paths was not--
with one notable exception--as luxuriant as that from the earth enriched
of human blood and bones about the old French forts.
These portages, or carrying paths, which differ from the trails of the
wood runners in that they are but short interruptions of the water paths
and were not designed or laid out, as a rule, by the wild engineers of the
forests and prairies but by human feet, lie across the great highway along
which, before the days of canals, one might have walked dry-shod from the
Atlantic to the Pacific--between the basins of the St. Lawrence and the
Atlantic, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, the Pacific and the Arctic
--a highway which has, however, been trodden by no one probably through
its entire length, for in places it runs over inaccessible peaks of
mountains and winds around the narrowest of ledges.
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